Hello & An Eyeball Pillow DIY

Hello! Long time no see, hey?

Receiving this adorable customer appreciation shot recently, inspired me to write a post. This is Rosie. Isn't she delightful?! I am thrilled to think about the adventures Rosie is going to have with her Furry Beast :)

Truth be told, I miss Teetoo. Over the many iterations of my life, I have found that I have swung back and forth between two loves; natural healing and art making/crafting. But I have yet to find a nice balance between the two. I have always found myself in a position where I felt I had to leave one for the other. At this time, I am very involved in my natural healing life as a homeopath and my full time work at the Canadian College of Homeopathic Medicine, but I would very much like to be sewing and drawing more than I have time to.

One thing I've been working up to do, is to make a big batch of Giant Sasquatches. I've had a lot of inquiries about them and I miss making them. I have no idea how long it is going to take me to get them done, but I am planning to do them this year. If you would like one and you want to have a better chance of getting one when the batch is available, you can either send me an email, follow the blog, like my Facebook page or follow me on Intstagram (andreateetoo). I will post to all of these places before I add the Sasquatches to the shop whenever that may be.

I thought I would share some photos from Instagram of a few projects I have worked on over the last year with you today. There aren't very many, but it is nice for me to document them here; for posterity's sake and in hopes of inspiring others to find more time to be creative.

The first two images are of a patchwork pillow I made for our bed several months ago. It was originally going to be a quilt, but I have learned that I am a crafter who likes to do a project that I can start and finish fairly quickly and though I've managed to make a few lap quilts over the years, I have yet to complete a full-sized quilt. In this case, I opted to turn the quilt into a pillowcase so I could feel good about actually completing something :)

The next project is a Halloween bunting I made from this Heidi Kenney Halloween Bunting Spoonflower fabric. This was a fun, quick and easy project. I put a star fabric on the back, so I can reverse it and keep it hung up in the living room the rest of the year. 

The illustration is a tree drawing for some friends who were married in September and wanted to make a Wedding Tree Guest Book. 

Over the summer, I made a lunch bag for my daughter, Winnie. I used the Quilted Lunch Bag pattern from the book, One-Yard Wonders. This is the second project I've made with this book and like the other one, The Folklore Bag, I found the instructions to be easy to follow and I am extremely happy with the final product.

This next project is something I made recently for my son, Eamon's, upcoming birthday in March. I saw an eyeball pillow for sale on ModCloth a while ago and thought he would love it. They don't have it in stock anymore, but I thought it would be fun to make my own anyway. So today, I'm going to give you the how-to so you can make your own eyeball pillow too.

Eyeball Pillow DIY

Materials

I used felt for this project. You will need some white and black felt and whatever colour you want for the iris, white thread, red thread, black thread and thread to match your iris colour, no-sew fabric glue and recycled polyfil.

Cut It Up

You can make this pillow in any dimensions you like. My pillow ended up being 12" around and 3.5" deep. For mine, I just found a top to a wicker basket that was a large circle and traced it for my template. It was approximately 12.5" in diameter and I cut two of these. You can use anything- a large serving plate would be a great option. 

Then I guessed on the proper depth of the pillow for that size of diameter and I went with 3.5", so I measured around the perimeter of my circle to make a strip of white felt that was about 4" x 40". Cut your strip a bit longer than the perimeter of your circle.

I found some other random round items to trace for the iris, pupil and white spot. My iris measures 6" across, my pupil measures 4" across and the white spot is a 1" circle.

Sew It Up

First take your iris and position it in the center of one of your large white circles (or off to one side if you like). Pin it down and sew it on with thread that matches the iris' colour. 

Then take your pupil and pin and sew it to the center of your iris, using black thread.

Now thread your machine with red thread and sew in some random veins. I just used a straight stitch and changed the direction every few stitches and tried to be as random as possible. To make the veins look  more realistic, sew a few of them so they split and make some of them span from the edge of the eyeball all the way to the iris and make some of them only span part way. 

Now take your long white strip and stitch one long side of it to the right side of the front of your eyeball. Your strip will be longer than the perimeter of your white circle, but don't worry about that. Sew right up until you meet the top of the strip and stop. 

Now take the other white circle that will be the back of your pillow and sew the other side of the pillow to the other side of your white strip (with right sides facing). Leave a little opening of about 5 inches before your strip end meets up with the front of the strip. Now clip around the edges of the seam allowance every 1/4" or so and flip right side out. 

At this point, I folded the end of my long strip under and laid the fold down as an edge onto the front of the white strip and with my machine I stitched the fold very close to the edge of the fold onto the front part of the strip so that it made a neat little seam. I left the five inch opening between the back of the pillow and the strip for stuffing. 

Stuff your pillow until it is nice and plump. You may have to do some pressing down and even punching here and there to make the pillow do what you want it to.

Now hand stitch the little opening at the back of your pillow.

Finally, use your no-sew fabric glue to glue your white spot down and you're done!

I hope you enjoy this little project!

If any of my directions are confusing, please leave me a comment and I would be happy to help and/or change my wording here to make it easier to understand.

Happy sewing! And hopefully, I'll post here now and then over the next few months. I've missed you!

♥ Andrea ♥